So where do things stand?
After some of the most dramatic events in recent American history—the Biden-Trump debate, the assassination attempt, Biden’s exit from the race, and Kamala Harris’s triumphant Democratic Convention—it seems we are… right back where we were at the start of 2024. The polls show a race that is effectively tied. Harris leads overall, but where it counts—the handful of swing states that will most likely decide the election—things are mostly too close to call. The conclusion seems clear. Harris’s impressive debut has allowed her mostly to woo back voters who had abandoned the Democrats out of concerns about Biden’s age and mental condition. But she has not managed to eat into Trump’s earlier support.
This relative failure should not be terribly surprising. American political divisions remain as petrified as ever—and each passing year simply confirms most voters more deeply in their existing views. The election map has barely changed since 2012, when Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney. Since then, Iowa, Florida and Ohio, once swing states, have turned firmly Republican, while Arizona and Georgia have gone in the other direction. The state of the economy makes a difference, but despite the easy availability of statistics, voters’ perception of the economy depends heavily on their political leanings. After four years of solid growth, most Republicans think we are either in or on the brink of a recession.
Will Donald Trump “finally” go too far and implode? He continues to say and do utterly outrageous things, including trying to film a political ad at Arlington military cemetery, and claiming that Harris supports the murder of newborn babies. Either of these outrages would probably have sunk the chances of normal presidential candidates. But voters who remain ready to vote for Trump after his endless lies, his blatant racism and misogyny, his miserable mishandling of the COVID epidemic, his attempt to overturn a legitimate election, his encouragement of an insurrection, his two impeachments, his gross mishandling of national security documents, the civil findings against him for rape and fraud, his multiple criminal indictments, and his criminal convictions, are very unlikely to change their minds because of these additional proofs of his moral decrepitude. For someone so ambivalent about vaccinations, Trump has managed to inoculate himself with remarkable effectiveness against scandal and discredit.
For many years now, news analysts have repeatedly declared that Trump’s spell has “finally” broken (see for instance, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). They have been wrong each time. “It defies comprehension,” an MSNBC commetator wrote this week, that Trump would continue to talk about the Arlington cemetery incident, which seemed so obviously harmful to him. But by continuing to insist, brazenly, that the real issue was Harris’s supposed responsibility for the deaths of thirteen Americans killed in a suicide attack during the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul, Trump turned a scandal into a “controversy,” forcing the media to report on both sides, and blunted the damage. It is a strategy he has used many times before, and it usually works.
There are now just two months left before the election, and the candidates have relatively few opportunities left to break out of the current stalemate. The most obvious is the Trump-Harris debate on September 10. For the reasons I just went into, Trump’s own performance will probably change few people’s minds. As in the debate against Biden in June, he will spout lies and insults, bluster and mock and rage. He won’t bother preparing, because, after all, it is so much easier to make things up on the fly than to do anything as tiresome as memorizing facts. But, again, anyone driven to change his or her mind because of a particularly outrageous Trump statement would have abandoned him a long time ago. No, the biggest variable in the debate is Harris. If she shows herself confident, competent, and genuinely committed to helping people—in a word, “presidential”—she will help herself, although probably not enough to turn things decisively in her favor. If she seems rattled by Trump, uncertain, a “flip-flopper,” vacuous, or, worst of all, out of touch with “ordinary Americans,” she will hurt herself badly. In this case, liberals will rage against “the media” for judging her and Trump by entirely different standards. But, in truth, it is less the media than the hopelessly divided electorate which has long judged Trump in a different way. The New York Times and other major newspapers could print reports on the debate that did nothing but expose Trump’s lies, and it would make little if any difference to the election’s outcome.
After the debate, the other major pre-election event on the calendar is a possible government shutdown at the end of October. Trump is pushing his allies in the House of Representatives, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, to resist Democratic attempts to work out a compromise stopgap solution to keep the government functioning through the election, in the hope voters will blame Harris for the resulting confusion, and economic effects. The tactic might work. The media will need to report on the Republicans’ justifications for the shutdown, regardless of the degree of hypocrisy involved, and voters will mostly perceive a controversy.
Otherwise, my sense is that, barring some unpredicted major event that turns everything upside down, the election will largely depend on how voters perceive Kamala Harris. As with the debate, if she can project an image of competence, confidence, and genuine good will—if, in a word, she can inspire enough trust—she has a chance. If Trump manages to define her as an out-of-touch radical, or pushes her onto the defensive, she has much less of one.
Right now, analysts seem to agree that the election is a tossup. But we also have to remember that the election won’t end with the voting on November 5. If Harris ekes out a victory, Trump will certainly challenge it. And while changes to the electoral law, plus a Democrat in the White House, will make it much harder for Republicans to challenge final certification of a Harris victory, the capture of local election offices by Trump loyalists in the swing states could undo Harris at that level. There is a long road ahead.